nice
I have a very ambiguous relationship with nice. I more or less know how it started. imagine a man and a little boy walking along the side of a street in a little town in northeastern Brasil nearly seventy years ago. there is no pavement, there are no sidewalks, there are no cars, there are no telephone lines. there may have been no electric lines. there are no gas pipes underground or above ground for that matter. there were no water pipes. water was delivered in huge metal ewers that were probably tin. the houses are made of mud brick, and mud plaster covers the bricks, but the mud is painted bright colors, reds, pinks, blues, yellows. no oranges and no whites. definitely no beige, tan, khaki, or oatmeal. the man and the boy both wear suits, heavy wool, dark blue, despite their living and walking within two hundred miles of the equator. no one else except other white missionaries are stupid enough to wear dark blue heavy wool suits in that part of the world. at least the boy's suit has short pants, so he's only wearing half an oven. there are kids in the street, who stop their playing to stare at these two apparitions from some foreign world. the little boy smiles at them, but the man does not. he looks very serious and he pretends not to see the kids playing. and then a miracle happens. a young woman steps into the street. she wears a loose-fitting short dress with more colors than the little boy knew were allowed in clothes. she sees the intruders and smiles, then walks toward them and past them. the little boy is thrilled and flabbergasted. when the young woman walks, more moves than he knew could. he stares, halfway to love and willing to go the rest of the way. as she passes, the young woman looks directly at the little boy, winks, and smiles a smile he thinks has to be especially for him, even though nothing he ever did or can imagine doing could deserve that smile. the little boy tries to watch over his shoulder as the young woman walks away. sure enough, still more moves than he ever imagined could. "daddy, daddy!" he foolishly says. "did you see that?" incomprehensibly, the man asks, "what?" the little boy tries to describe the young woman, all the colors, and oh my god! all that moved. the man tells him, "women don't walk that way, and if they did, nice boys wouldn't notice." the little boy blinks and shuts up, but he resolves he will never, ever, ever be a nice boy. to some extent, he succeeds. but of course, he can't really succeed, can he? before the boy has a chance to grow up in Brasil, he is brought to the United States where the whole culture depends on everyone pretending to be nice. ("pretending?" you probably want to object. yes. how many times have you heard a neighbor say, "oh I can't believe he did anything like that! he was always such a nice man!" then the prosecutor proves he not only did it, he did it often.) if he doesn't learn to at least act like he is nice, then he will wind up in juvee, then in jail, then in prison. this is not a desirable graduation path. so he learns to act nice most of the time, and is eventually rewarded with a girlfriend, then another, and so forth, and each girlfriend teaches him more of what is needed to be nice enough. bless you, girlfriends! he learns well enough to survive an apparent adulthood and to retire and mostly be thought of as a nice man. but trust me, he never learned to be nice enough to live up to "women don't walk that way, and if they did, nice boys wouldn't notice." he loves to watch Brasilian women samba!
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